Spyware Purveyor Closes Doors

DirectRevenue, a company that made tens of millions of dollars pushing ads onto compromised computers, closed down this week – nearly four months after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) levied a $1.5 million fine against the firm. The light shed on the operations of Direct Revenue and other spyware and adware firms gave security researchers enough data to estimate that each consumer infected by the software nets a firm nearly $3 in revenue per year.

According to a message posted to its website, DirectRevenue and its subsidiary Best Offers “have ceased operations.” The company left behind a single page of instructions to allow victims to uninstall its software and an email address, which appeared to be invalid. The company gave no reason for its closure.

More information on this story is available at: http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/615
  

Security analysts are warning of another malicious software program masquerading as an installer file for Skype. A password-stealing Trojan is targeting the popular, eBay-owned VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and IM service – posing as a security plug-in and displaying a fake log-in screen that’s almost identical to the real thing. Skype is frequently targeted by malware writers because it is so widely used. Other attacks have focused on sending links to malware, via the program’s chat function, as well as worms. Those who worry about network security tend to dislike

Skype due to the service’s ability to embed things into a protocol, its disruption of calling services and the fact that it uses supernodes. It is also said that Skype’s encryption makes it difficult to determine what malware it is allowing onto an enterprise network. Skype is recommending that users update their anti-virus detections to avoid infection.

To learn more, visit: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2200670,00.asp

A coalition of nine privacy and consumer groups have proposed a “do-not-track list” that would allow consumers to opt out of advertising efforts that track their online movements. The groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), the Consumer Federation of America and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, called for the Federal Trade Commission to create a list of servers that track users online. Consumers could then download the list, and use security software, to block sites that they don’t want tracking them. Similar in some ways to the do-not-call telemarketing list (currently maintained by

the FTC), this new list would allow consumers to take control of their personal information online. While they would originally have to download the list and manually enter sites to block into security software, the privacy coalition expects that browser developers would create tools to automate that process.

The full proposal can be viewed at: http://www.
worldprivacyforum.org/pdf/ConsumerProtections_
FTC_ConsensusDoc_Final_s.pdf

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